Last September, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff captured the world’s mood when she opened the U.N. General Assembly with a withering rebuke of America’s massive electronic surveillance program.

On Wednesday, President Barack Obama, fresh from ordering up airstrikes against Islamic extremists in Syria, will strike a different tone, calling on the international community to ramp up surveillance of legions of foreign jihadists fighting alongside the self-styled Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

And he is likely to find a receptive audience.

The U.N. Security Council is poised to endorse a U.S.-drafted resolution that would require governments to grant law enforcement authorities wider scope to monitor and suppress the travel and other activities of suspected local jihadists.

Of course the only way that the governments can do that is by putting everybody under surveillance.

Does anyone believe that will actually stop a terrorist attack? If they couldn’t stop the Tsarnaev brothers despite getting alerted by Russian intelligence, how are they going to stop anyone else? The TSA was imposed on us on the excuse that we needed to be kept safe from terrorism. In all these many years they have not stopped one terrorist, though they have stolen the property of passengers, plus legally molested many of them.

Face it: There is no rational reason from a political or economic viewpoint, for anyone in the Federal Government to want to try to prevent ISIS from growing to its current size and taking territory. President Obama, again, had forewarning about ISIS’ growing power and its threat to the region. But what good would it do for him if he had prevented the invasion of Iraq? He wouldn’t be able to now reverse the damage done by the Edward Snowden revelations if we didn’t have a current threat that was making headlines.